Over the past few months, Google has really pulled off its gloves in dealing with online spammers that have mucked up the Internet with endless reams of spam and worthless content.
It has always been a pet peeve of mine, to see very well written, high quality content trashed down to the 5th or 6th page of Google results, because the first couple of pages were controlled by keyword spammers.
Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against using keywords to get traffic. After all, how else is Google supposed to identify whether your content is relevant to search results. Identifying relevance is the easy part, but the hard part for Google (up until now) has been identifying meaningful, quality content.
SEO in Moderation
Until I started full time SEO work about half a decade ago, like everyone else I had to live with the mess. You just became accustomed to scrolling down Google results – sort of like how we had to become accustomed to telemarketers calling us during supper.
Once I started truly studying how search engines identify relevant and meaningful content, I realized two things. There are very effective and useful ways to let Google know that your website is important and should be listed at the top of search results.
However, there are also hundreds of ways that you can “game the system” using all sorts of tactics like keyword spamming, article marketing for incoming links, finding ways to fake high-value incoming links, and more.
With that said, I saw the writing on the wall. Just reading through Google Webmaster forums, you could see how Google representatives were frustrated by the efforts of so many self-proclaimed SEO “experts” to outsmart the Google algorithm, and get their useless, keyword-spammed content listed high in search engine results.
These listings plagued Google results like a fungal disease for many years.
Over the past few years, I’ve tried to advocate to all of my clients an approach that uses SEO techniques in moderation, while focusing primarily on paying writers fair wages to produce the highest quality content possible.
Let’s face it, writers are becoming an in-demand commodity now. Gone are the days when you can purchase $5 articles from some mass-publishing firm in India and think that the keyword spammed content is going to get you anywhere.
Google Gets Clever
Over the past few months, Google has released two major algorithm update that wreaked havoc with the biggest websites that were guilty of paying for sub-par writing that was highly optimized. These were sites that leaned more toward SEO and less toward good, interesting content.
Somehow – and no one really knows how yet – Google managed to figure out a way to isolate high-quality, valuable articles while still paying attention to the keyword usage.
And that is important. I’ve seen people, after Google’s latest updates, completely give up on SEO. No more keyword focus, no more careful keyword analysis in story generation, and far less focus on important SEO activities that still matter.
Not to toot my own horn, but the evidence of a balanced quality/seo approach is more than apparent when, just this week, I was able to land Top Secret Writers #5 in search results for the search term “National Security Archive”.
This was a story that was well-written by one of my writers, carefully and moderately keyword optimized by yours truly. The only listings above Top Secret Writers are from the National Archives website itself. We even beat out Wikipedia.
Do I have some secret looking-glass into Google’s algorithm? Did I keyword spam the article so that it would “trick out” Google? NO.
The trick isn’t really a trick at all. It’s working in collaboration with Google to produce high quality content on the Internet. It’s reading what Google has to say on Google Webmasters, and then doing exactly what they ask.
Google wants accurate keyword tagging. Google wants careful and accurate alt text descriptions. Google wants you to map your site and tell it what you’re writing about.
But most important, Google wants you to offer the Internet only the best, most useful and meaningful content available. That means good, original research, interviews, and original writing.
It means it’s time to hire the best writers and it’s time to stop publishing the writing of people who clearly never even graduated from 8th grade English class. No offense – but this is Web 3.0 folks. You can either get with the program, or get left in the dust.
